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Digital Media student. A place for my stuff.

Opportunities – MEDA301 wk4

This week in class we discussed how to make, take and seek opportunities. As such, I’m going to share previous times I’ve done this, as well as failures and efforts I plan to make.

To start, I’m part of a local church in Dapto, and as a part of that, I assist in our social and digital media ministries. As a part of this I get to work with a team to develop videos to help get messages across clearly, and document events hosted there. I am already a part of a tri-weekly rotation which photographs Youth group activities and helps post them to Instagram and Facebook. In the video realm, I recently completed a series of videos to encourage Youth to dream big (One of which can be found here). I’ve also completed several comedic videos as part of my Diploma and Adv. Diploma of Screen and Media.

Failures are inevitable. At one point or another, something will go wrong, or you won’t be suited to a role, and you’ll fail. I have a few of these stories, and some link in with previous examples. During my TAFE Diplomas, I decided for one of my projects to be an intentionally badly edited parody TV commercial. As such, I looked at tropes in marketing and how to intentionally look low budget. The only issue was, my teacher didn’t find it funny. I did not cater my work to my audience, and as such I received a negative review.

Another such example was less a failure in terms of talent or skills, but more a failure to make an impact. I had done a small editing job for a company’s training video, and as a form or payment was given the opportunity to sit down and have lunch with someone fairly prominently in the digital media industry. The lunch went well, we exchanged contacts and he finished by saying he would hook me up with an opportunity to sit in on the filming of a corporate ad. Sounds great, right?
Well, I arrived early to the shoot, yet apparently was not really expected. Not unexpected, as they had been given prior warning, but I wasn’t expected as they didn’t really understand why I would want to show up and just watch.
I ended up sitting in a room for a few hours, trying to make small talk and ask “the right questions”. It didn’t really work, I didn’t make a splash and they told me that I didn’t really need to come back tomorrow because it would probably be most of the same stuff anyway (and also because they most likely didn’t really want me there anyway).

And so plans; I’ve been making headway doing small social media jobs for friends of family members and their companies, so I plan to pursue that more, and I also plan on entering small scale video competitions to grow my practice and add to my show real.